


Refraction

by AnotherSpoonyBard



Series: Chaos Theory [10]
Category: Bleach
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Chaos Theory AU, Gen, Vignette series, Winter War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-24
Updated: 2017-12-29
Packaged: 2018-11-04 13:30:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 12
Words: 16,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10991907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnotherSpoonyBard/pseuds/AnotherSpoonyBard
Summary: Refraction is the change in direction of wave propagation due to a change in its transmission medium. The same thing becomes different, sometimes radically different, when the surrounding context is changed. Extra scenes, alternate perspectives, and supplementary tidbits fromCatastrophe Theory.





	1. Rising Tide

**Author's Note:**

> Hi everyone. I'm still here. Just, you know, writing for fun is something I can apparently only manage during the summer, so.
> 
> Anyway, this is _Refraction_. For me, it's mostly a way for me to try and chip off some of the rust that has accumulated over the year and get back into the swing of writing for the CT-verse, so that my next stabs at actual plot advancement are not awful. For you, it'll be a collection of missing scenes/extra tidbits from _Catastrophe Theory_. So, actual missing scenes, deep-dives into character headspace, alternate-POV takes on the some of the scenes that appear in _Catastrophe_ , and so on. Expect chapter lengths to vary widely, and some chapters not to have anything new added this way.
> 
> On a slightly-cooler note, perhaps, I'm happy to take requests, if you want more of X during some part of the plot A, or Y's perspective on scene B, or whatever. Drop me a line and I'll see what I can do. No promises on timetables (I'm very very rusty here and working to boot), but I'll try not to leave you hanging too long between chapters.
> 
> Cheers, y'all.

Ever since Hell, Jinta had felt… _weird_. 

Not all the time, just sometimes. Honestly, he tried to ignore it, because weird was normal in his life and so if he sometimes felt _extra_ weird, that was bad news. 

So he hadn’t told anyone. Tessai looked at him kinda funny sometimes, like he was considering saying something or waiting for Jinta to say something. But Jinta never said anything at those times, and Tessai never ended up saying anything either. So that was that, he figured. 

The fish cooking in the kitchen smelled really good today, and normally that would have been enough to make him feel pretty awesome, but right just now the weird was really making it hard to feel anything else. He couldn’t really explain it, even if he wanted to—it was just like being sick in your guts right before you threw up but not ever actually getting to the part where it happened. Just a stirring first, like stirring soup, and then more like flipping pancakes, and then—

“Yoruichi.” Tessai put the plates down on the table in front of them, voice steady. But even Jinta knew he wasn’t just trying to tell her dinner was ready. 

There was a smacking sound when Yoruichi slapped her knees to haul herself to her feet. Weird and sharp when everything else felt like… fog. Or something thick like that. 

“Yeah,” she said, standing up and looking at him and Ururu for a second. Jinta figured he probably oughta stand too, so he did.

“Ururu, Jinta.” And then Tessai’s hand was on his back, the other one on Ururu’s, and he was guiding them towards the stairs. “Go to the basement. Don’t open the door for anyone but us.”

It wasn’t the first time that had ever happened. But it meant things were serious. Jinta swallowed past a lump in his throat, too dazed to put up any kind of fight. The door closed behind them—he could hear the sound of Tessai sealing it with kidō. Then it was just the two of them, the dim stairwell, and the basement below, big and empty. 

Ururu’s hand was cold. Jinta wasn’t sure which one of them had reached for the other. If anyone else had been there, he would have let go. But there wasn’t anyone else. Yoruichi and Tessai had left, and Kisuke was still in Hell. 

It was just them. 

Beside him, Ururu’s other hand found his shoulder. She pushed down until he was sitting. It probably wasn’t hard—she was really strong like that. His butt hit the wooden stair underneath him, and he leaned back against the wall sideways. He still felt like he was gonna be sick. 

Ururu didn’t ask about it, or about why he was breathing so loud and slow, gulping air like he’d run for miles. Instead, she held his hand, then shifted sideways to slump against him a little. She leaned into him, and he leaned into the wall, and it didn’t feel quite as bad anymore. 

“I miss Kisuke-san,” she said quietly. Always quietly, with her. 

And he was always loud. Except right now, maybe. 

Because he didn’t know what to say to that. Just…

“Yeah. Me too.”

* * *

Sweat trickled between Uryū’s shoulderblades; he was more concerned with the strain he could feel pulling at the well-warmed muscles of his arms. 

Such were the perils of trying to block a strike from his captain, he supposed. 

Shifting out from underneath the heavier of Katen Kyōkotsu’s blades, he remembered to check for the lighter one this time, and moved Yorugen’s right-hand sword to block. His reward was another heavy clang, but his attempted deflection worked better that time, and he didn’t have to endure a contest of strength he would lose in a matter of seconds. Hopping away with _shunpō_ , he had just enough time to pull in a breath before Kyōraku was again pressing in too close for comfort. This time, Uryū crossed Yorugen’s halves to block the first hit and tried to get in a strike of his own before the second connected. 

“Yare, yare.” Kyōraku frowned slightly when Uryū’s knee came in for his abdomen. Abandoning the attempt to cut with his second blade, he caught the incoming leg with a pair of fingers, stopping the motion dead. “You’re so persistent.”

It was hardly a fair complaint. While they sparred most days until Uryū conceded, it was Kyōraku who’d agreed to those terms in the first place. Fair or not, though, he’d complain—and make a big show of doing so—for as long as they continued. 

Clicking his tongue against the side of his teeth, Uryū reversed places with his shadow. Kyōraku’s brows went up; it took him a split second to recover from the sudden loss of resistance. Uryū used that second to flash behind him, hooking one of Yorugen’s blades with the other and swinging in a whiplike motion. It was the one thing that could reasonably extend his range beyond that of Katen Kyōkotsu. 

In less time than it took to blink, Kyōraku pivoted, the lighter blade in his left hand knocking Yorugen aside. “Hold on a minute, Ishida-kun.” The request was given in a much more serious tone than his whining, barely a _request_ at all.

Uryū complied immediately, unhooking his swords and taking a neutral grip on both, shifting back out of _Kage-e_ so that his body was once more solid. “Taichō?”

Kyōraku tilted his head, studying him for a long moment. His own hold on Katen Kyōkotsu was lax, almost negligent, but Uryū knew much better now than to trust the impression that gave. “Don’t you think it’s interesting? That we both have powers that make use of shadows and darkness?” His tone had flipped again. It was light, so effervescent it was completely unreadable. The captain hardly ever meant only what he said. 

Frankly, though, that was more common in Uryū’s life than the opposite. He was used to it by this point, and turning the phrase about in his head—picking it apart in search of the real intention behind it—was by now a process he began without even consciously deciding to do so. 

“You want to know how they interact.” 

The little pull at the side of Kyōraku’s mouth was indication enough that he was right. 

“It might be interesting, if I could hide in your shadow. What happens to me when you have two of them, I wonder?” Carefully, the captain placed the smaller of his two swords in his sash. It slid in without cutting—one of many advantages zanpakutō had over actual steel.

There was, perhaps, merit in finding out. Uryū exhaled, already feeling the comfortable warmth of exertion being chased away by the cold settled over the division’s training grounds. His breath fogged in front of him, obscuring Kyōraku temporarily before it cleared. “I suppose we might as well find out.”

It wasn’t without risk, but he knew the captain wouldn’t have brought it up in the first place if he didn’t think it was important enough for that. So Uryū split his shadow as though to use his _Kagegaitō_ technique, without shrouding himself in either. They forked outwards behind him, both unsettlingly _not_ where they should be, given the position of the sun. He’d learned to pay much more attention to that kind of thing, since he’d discovered that this was the nature of his power.

“Go ahead.”

Kyōraku took half a step forward before pausing, his head turning to the left. He squinted out at something Uryū’s angle didn’t immediately allow him to see, then frowned. “We might have to wait,” he murmured. 

Sure enough, a jigokuchō appeared a moment later, fluttering towards the captain. When he held a thick, callused finger out towards it, the messenger butterfly landed, the privacy kidō laid on it preventing Uryū from hearing whatever was relayed. He hardly needed to. 

“Aizen?”

The captain compressed his lips into a thin line. “Yama-jii is calling a captains’ meeting, so you’re probably right.” A pause. “We’ll continue this tomorrow.” 

“First thing?” Uryū lifted a brow, cognizant of the reaction that was going to get him but asking anyway. 

A deep sigh followed. “If I _have_ to.” Which was Kyōraku-taichō for _yes_.

Uryū nodded once, unsurprised when his captain disappeared from his senses the moment after. It seemed Aizen was finally on the move.


	2. Trouble's Never Far

It was this day that Yuzu would always consider the beginning. 

In truth, she knew that the seeds of this war had been planted long ago—maybe more than a hundred years ago, if the way some people told it was anything to go by. But she could hardly comprehend the _idea_ of a hundred years, yet. At least not as the kind of time span that might be just a fraction of a single life. Maybe, if everything went well and she was lucky enough to survive all of this, that would change. 

But now, and for her, this day was the beginning. 

Karin had been deployed to Karakura Town at some point early this morning; the jigokuchō with her sister’s message had been waiting for her when she woke at dawn to begin her hospital rotation. It was on her mind all day, but she declined when Isane-san asked her if she wanted to take the afternoon off. She could get through this, and she’d have to learn how. It wasn’t a one-day assignment like a Hollow patrol or anything like that. So she turned down the beds in the hospital rooms with the rest of her division, and helped Unohana-taichō with her appointments, and tried not to think too much about it. 

It was a little easier than it could have been after she’d received the second butterfly. That one had carried Uryū’s voice. His tone was even, but she could hear his concern in it anyway. 

_I finish divisional duties at four._

That was all it had said, and all it needed to. At four p.m. precisely, when Yuzu’s shift was over and she’d stowed her extra hospital garments in her locker, she headed out to the lobby. Uryū was there, looking solemn in his pressed shihakushō, standing near but not against one of the walls, a calm stone in the river of activity that the Fourth always seemed to contain. 

Yuzu felt something in herself uncoil. He didn’t protest when she wrapped her arms around him, resting her cheek against his chest. His hands found her shoulders; he let them rest there, a comfortable, reassuring weight. Like a blanket, or a favorite coat.

“Rukia-san suggested dinner,” he said after a moment. “Is that all right with you?”

She nodded mutely, pulling in a deep breath to fortify herself. Letting her arms loosen, Yuzu pulled away, tilting her head to meet his eyes. He seemed to get a bit taller every time she saw him. She, on the other hand… height would never be her advantage. 

“I can make it.”

Uryū pursed his lips, immediately shaking his head. “That won’t be necessary. I will do it. Do you mind if we use the Thirteenth?”

“Okay.” Yuzu nodded slightly, then followed him into shunpō. She wasn’t as fast, but he kept pace with her so she didn’t have to try and keep pace with him. She didn’t smile—that was a little too difficult just yet—but it was a near thing. 

They landed just outside the Thirteenth Division. Yuzu didn’t come here that often, but Uryū led them confidently around to the south side. A small building there looked like a modest house; he knocked on the front door with confidence and opened it a moment after. Yuzu followed him inside, removing her shoes at the front. She thought she could smell something burning, just a bit, but it wasn’t clear why until the nearest door on the left opened and a plume of smoke billowed out.

A moment later, Rukia appeared, leaning out from behind the doorway and nodding to the both of them. She looked a little harried, more than a few black hairs askew. “Ishida. It’s good that you’re here. I… tried to cook the rice ahead of time. I don’t think it worked.” She cleared her throat slightly awkwardly. “Hello, Yuzu.”

Yuzu did smile, then, hoping it came across as sympathetic. “Hello, Rukia. It looks like we got here at the right time, then.”

A considerable amount of scraping and cleaning and window-opening later, disaster was mostly averted, and Uryū shooed both of them out of the kitchen, insistent that he could take care of the rest by himself. Yuzu was not used to other people making meals for her, but she supposed it might be nice. So she sat with Rukia in the living room instead, drinking tea and trying to make herself relax. 

“It’s hard, isn’t it?” Rukia sighed heavily and set her teacup down a little inelegantly, the heavy ceramic bottom of it thudding against the wooden surface of the table. She blew an errant strand of hair out of her face, then tucked it behind her ear. “Being here, while someone who matters is in danger.”

Yuzu supposed it must be something Rukia had considerable experience with. Karin’s message had mentioned that Renji was going with her. So Rukia was probably back in exactly the same situation now. Yuzu knew they were close—even if it had been interrupted for a while before. 

Setting her own cup down, she folded her hands in her lap, feeling her brows knit together. “I can’t stop thinking about it for more than a few minutes at a time,” she admitted. “I don’t remember anything that happened at the Fourth today.” None of the patients she’d seen, none of the chores. She could guess, if only because there was a routine to it all, but the memories were just… not really there. All she recalled was the nagging worry at the back of her mind, and the more persistent thoughts that took hold if she didn’t defend against them. 

“It’s all… it’s really starting now, isn’t it?” And Karin was going to be at the epicenter of that very first round. 

Rukia nodded. “Yeah. Ukitake-taichō got a call from Yoruichi yesterday. Aizen sent two Arrancar to Karakura Town.” Perhaps Yuzu’s face gave away her lack of comprehension, because she continued. “They’re… Hollows with shinigami powers, kind of. But they can only be made from really strong Hollows in the first place. Menos-class. One of the ones from yesterday was probably a Vasto Lorde once.”

Those were terms Yuzu understood. A Vasto Lorde… she’d never seen one. Most shinigami hadn’t. And that was for the best—they were incredibly strong. Her teachers at Shin’ō hadn’t minced words about that. Only the most formidable and experienced of captains could hope to fight such a Hollow one-on-one and survive the engagement. Everyone else was advised to run and call backup. But the way Ōnabara-sensei had said it, with dropped tone and creased brow, had communicated something a little worse. 

Anyone else who encountered such a Hollow probably wouldn’t survive long enough to run in the first place.

It had always seemed like the kind of thing that would never _really_ happen. Not to Yuzu or anyone that she knew. The dark version of winning a lottery, or a fairy tale: such an outside possibility that it was more fantasy than reality. She swallowed. But now Karin—

“What do you do?” she asked softly, meeting Rukia’s violet gaze with hers. 

Rukia broke the contact first, dropping her eyes to the teacup in front of her and staring hard at the dull-colored liquid inside. Like it might yield the answer she wanted to give. Her lips thinned. “I don’t really know,” she admitted. “You just… keep doing what you do anyway, and try not to think about the worst. You do your best to believe in them, because nothing else will help anyway, so you might as well.” 

Her eyes narrowed as she grimaced, eyes lifting again. “It’s not great advice, I know.”

But Yuzu understood. There probably wasn’t any such thing as good advice for this situation. It just… was what it was. For now, she had to deal with that as well as she could.

* * *

Coyote blinked dull eyes slowly at Grimmjow, knowing the answer to his question before he’d even asked it. There was a certain kind of inevitability to all this. 

To the end.

“You sure you want to do that?” It was obvious what he planned to do. The Sexta was not a talented deceiver. Even the fact that he barely tolerated Aizen was plain as day. He managed to keep enough of a lid on it to pass, most of the time. But there was no mistaking that everyone knew that he hardly even wanted to be here. That if he ever saw the opportunity, he’d kill Aizen. Or probably any of the rest of them; that part was slightly harder to say overall. Though there were clear cases of yes.

Still… if Grimmjow did this, chances were good that it’d come back to bite him harder than anything else had yet. Coyote couldn’t say he wanted that. He didn’t think he’d want it for anyone, really.

“Why? Got a problem?” The other Espada’s eyes were narrow blue slits; the pull of his mouth shifted the mask fragment at his jaw slightly. He _leaked_ restlessness in a way most of them had learned to contain already. Not him, though. 

Coyote let himself shrug. “I don’t really care what you do, but Aizen’s not going to like it.” Understatement—severe understatement. He declined to mention that Aizen probably already _knew_. Had probably factored this in just like he factored everything else in. Coyote’s comprehension of what their leader was capable of extended far enough to grant him that much insight, at least. Enough to know that Grimmjow was already doomed to some kind of punishment. 

“He’ll change his tune when I bring him shinigami heads on a pike.”

No he wouldn’t. Not even slightly. 

Coyote might have sighed, if it wouldn’t have taken more energy than he felt like he had in that moment. So instead he spoke steadily, evenly. “I don’t think he will.”

Grimmjow was getting impatient with the conversation. It was in the deep furrow between his eyebrows, the way he shifted his weight from foot to foot in a way Coyote wasn’t sure he noticed. 

“You ordering me not to go?” It sounded like a challenge, snapped from the jaws of something caged. Something looking for a reason to close those teeth over flesh instead of words. 

“Tch.” The scoff left Coyote in a short, soft gust. He unfolded his arms, letting them hang loose at his sides. A minute de-escalation. “Even if I did, it wouldn’t make a difference, would it?”

There was no reply; Grimmjow looked at him like it should be the most obvious thing in the world. 

It was, of course. 

He did sigh, that time. “Be careful out there, Grimmjow. You shouldn’t underestimate the shinigami.” Or Aizen. But he had no plans to say that here. All of the cautioning words he could muster were destined for deaf ears. 

_Why are you bothering?_ Lilynette clearly didn’t see the point. 

He turned away from Grimmjow, leaving the other Arrancar and his _Fracción_ to do as they would. His footsteps were noiseless down the stone hall—he felt a bit like… a ghost, maybe. Coyote knew the answer to her question, but it wasn’t until he’d settled down to try for some sleep that he could bring himself to give it, even to her. 

_I don’t want it all to end again._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there are the codas to _Catastrophe's_ second chapter. Just a reminder that I'm taking requests for scenes or character studies if you want to see something in particular. Cheers, y'all.


	3. Quake and Tremble

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _Content Warning_ : Borderline self-harm. Trauma.

By the time they made it back to the Urahara Shop, Karin could feel the blood beginning to dry. In her hair and clothes, on her skin, everywhere. She wasn’t convinced that she _wasn’t_ shedding flakes of it everywhere, red flecks of the last remains of what had been someone who was alive. Until she’d killed him. Dry and crumbly like rust, shuffling off her like skin off a snake. She wanted to scrape it all off with her fingernails, or with steel wool, or with every medical disinfectant they carried at her dad’s clinic or in the Fourth. 

It was hard to tell if the smell or the feel was worse. All she knew was that she could barely hear the others talking around her. Barely registered the familiar sensation of stepping into _shunpō_ and heading back to the store. When they’d gotten there, she still hadn’t been able to make any sense of what was being said or done. Only that Hitsugaya was looking at her like he might stare a hole through her and saying _something_.

She didn’t care. How could she care about anything right now?

It was Matsumoto that touched her first. Carefully, with the gentle hands of someone who’d handled these situations before. Whatever _these situations_ were, exactly. Karin flinched away from her hard, wide eyes fixing on her face, trying to decide why it was familiar. But she didn’t want anyone with a familiar face to touch her. Not with all the blood still—

“Karin-chan. It’s okay. It’s over now. Can you let go of Hisaku’s release?”

What? But Hisaku…

She glanced down. There she was, still held in a white-knuckled grip. Hisaku was bloody, too, just like Karin was. 

Something else appeared in her periphery. She blinked. Red. Renji. He was looking at her like he wanted to say something, an expression on his face she didn't know what to do with. 

“Hey,” he said. His voice was too quiet, for him; he crouched in front of her, even though it had to hurt for him to bend that way right now. She could see a dark, wet spot on his shihakushō, near a tear in it at his shoulder. “I can clean her for you. But you’ve gotta let go of the release first, okay?”

She almost didn’t do it. But then Hisaku herself was speaking, and as always, she seemed to cut through all the rest of the noise and fog in Karin’s head. 

_Do as he says. I will be here when you’re ready._

A lump she couldn’t explain formed in her throat. Karin swallowed past it painfully and nodded, letting the release go and letting Renji take hold of the katana and her sheath as well. He stepped away, glancing at someone outside her field of vision, and then a moment later Matsumoto replaced him there, smiling gently. 

“I’m sorry if I startled you,” she said first. Only when Karin had nodded an acknowledgement of this apology did she continue. “You need to bathe now, Karin.” Her voice dropped until it was just a murmur. “Do you want to go by yourself, or would you like my help?”

If she’d made the offer with anyone else in earshot, Karin might have reacted badly. But because it was just them, she knew it was meant well. In fact… she almost accepted. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be alone with her thoughts right now. But dammit, she wasn’t a child anymore. She shouldn’t need anything like that. Hastily, Karin shook her head, digging deep for the words to prove what she was trying to indicate. 

“I’m fine.”

It sounded like a lie even to her. Dull, toneless. But Matsumoto did her a solid and pretended like it was the truth, stepping aside to allow Karin to make her way to the bathroom. 

It wasn’t really a fancy one, exactly, but it was nice enough. A whole half of it was a tiled stall behind a glass door, with a bucket and a wand and a tub off to one side. With trembling fingers, Karin peeled off her shitagi and kosode. They stuck in places, and she sucked a breath in between her teeth when they came away from some of her injuries. She could feel her own blood, sticky and warm, oozing from a few of her half-clotted wounds. Most of them were burns, from that Arrancar’s heat. 

Untying her sash, she carefully placed that on the sink counter. The uniform she’d just as soon never see again, but _that_ , she’d have to clean. Sliding her hakama down over her hips, she stepped out of them and accidentally caught sight of herself in the mirror. 

Her lips parted. Everywhere her skin was smeared in browning red. It had soaked into her sarashi in blotches and streaks as well, and matted her hair to the side of her head on the left. She looked… she looked like shit. Which was about how she felt. 

Moving her eyes down, Karin flung away the rest of her clothes without looking at herself, keeping her eyes fixed on the shower wand ahead instead. When they were all gone, she hurried into the stall, sliding the glass door shut behind her and turning the water on all the way to the hottest setting. She had to—she needed to be _clean_. Wash it away, all of it. Maybe she could forget how it felt if she could get it all away from her skin. The blood. The gore. 

The guilt. 

Karin gritted her teeth as the scalding water hit one of her burns, bracing her hands against the wall and pressing her forehead to the tile. In its holder, the wand pointed the water all down towards her back, catching some of her hair and plastering it to her skin. She clenched her jaw, curling her fingers in towards her palms. They left little streaks of red behind on the tile of the wall. 

She stood like that for… she didn’t know how long. It occurred to her that she was wasting water eventually, so she stepped out from under the stream, unhooking the wand from its spot and rinsing the rest of herself down. There was soap on a shelf mounted to the wall; she dropped a bar of it into the bucket and filled it up, grabbing a cloth and soaking it in the scalding water with bubbles. 

And then she scrubbed. Top to bottom, until it hurt and then some. Her skin turned pink, and still she kept at it, certain that she could still _feel_ it there—the blood still soaking into her like she was a sponge. Like it was sitting against her bones now, seeping into her heart and lungs and all the other places she couldn’t reach.

Her vision blurred. Something hot like the water spilled over her face. A sob tore its way from her throat; her breath stuttered. Karin paused in her scrubbing long enough to drop into a crouch, wrapping her arms around her legs and trying to hold herself together. Water swirled around her feet, pink as it found its way to the drain. 

She’d known she’d probably have to do this someday. Take a life. She’d already _done_ it, if Hollows counted. But that… Hollows could speak, sometimes, but they weren’t… they weren’t quite the same. Killing them was freeing them. From the all-encompassing need to consume. It was giving them a chance to live again, as… as whole people. 

But that Arrancar. He seemed just as much like a whole person as she was. It wasn’t hard to imagine that there were things he cared about, people that mattered to him, goals he wanted to accomplish. Hollows didn’t have those things. Shinigami broke their masks so they could have them again. 

So they could have faces. 

Pressing her nose into her knees, Karin forced herself to breathe slowly. Her wounds pulled and her body ached and she was hungry and tired and _sore_. But still she couldn’t gather the motivation to move. To do anything but stay here, curled in on herself and wishing the world was some other way. She was a killer, now. She couldn’t ever take that back, no matter what she did. She’d ended a life—a life she had no business taking. Yuzu wouldn’t have done that. Uryū wouldn’t have, either. They would have found some other way. A way that didn’t make them killers. 

Karin hadn’t even hesitated. 

A knock at the door registered, just barely. “Karin-chan? I’m leaving your spare clothes just out here, okay?” Matsumoto. 

Matsumoto was a killer, too. And Renji, and Hitsugaya, and everyone else out there. Why wasn’t it ripping them apart from the inside like it was with her? Was there just something _wrong_ with her? Was she as weak as she’d always been afraid of being? Had they done things like this before? Did it get easier?

 _Should_ it?

Karin found that none of the answers came easily to her. In fact, the only clear thought she had just then was that other people probably needed to use the shower, and she was being an asshole for taking so damn long. Mechanically, she forced herself to stand. Forced herself to clean the rest of her hair, to check that all the blood was gone. To turn the water off, squeeze her hair out, and wrap a towel around herself so she could retrieve her clothes. To numbly shove her limbs through the right holes in the shihakushō. To kick her old one over to the side of the room, at least. 

She couldn’t bring herself to carry any of it out except her sash, which she stuffed into her pocket. She also couldn’t bring herself to look at Matsumoto when she left, or make eye contact with anyone or even stay in the same room as any of them. 

The roof seemed least likely to force any of that. The fact that it was raining didn’t really matter. She muttered the incantation for an _enkōsen_ and nudged it up over her head, planting herself on the edge of the roof and hugging her knees again. Her fingers were still pink from too much scrubbing. She needed to bandage her burns, or see Tessai about them. 

But she didn’t.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've gotten a couple requests for specific things, which'll be showing up in later chapters. There's still time to ask for stuff, though, if you want anything in particular to get explored here. This chapter was a little heavy, but the lead-up to Hitsugaya talking to Karin on the roof seemed like something worth devoting a few more words to.


	4. Times, a-Changin'

Tatsuki dipped her nose below the line of her loosely-wrapped scarf, seeking the warmth of it. Next to her, Orihime’s breath clouded out into the cold air of a Karakura Town morning in the middle of winter. 

Despite growing up in a much warmer place, Sado didn’t seem to be bothered by it. Maybe because he was huge. Tatsuki took half a step closer to him, pretending it wasn’t intentional. He pretended not to notice. 

“This is the fifth one in the last month.” The house in front of them had been half-demolished, like something had slammed into and through the roof. The entire left side of it sagged, boards broken and drooping, and the other half wasn't looking that great either. No doubt some construction company would be moving in to demolish all of it before it fell on the house next door. An act of god. She’d heard that was what insurance people called it when they didn’t know what it could really be. Or when someone was just really damn unlucky. 

“I don’t think the thing that hit it was very big,” Orihime said, holding her hands out in front of her and squaring off her index fingers and thumbs to form a frame. Apparently wanting to be a giant, laser-shooting robot required a degree in engineering, so that’s what she was going to college for. She and Sado were both pretty local, so Tatsuki saw them often enough, but sometimes she wondered if it would stay that way much longer. Not much demand for engineers in Karakura Town.

But maybe if random stuff like this kept happening…

“You feel anything weird, Sado?” Tatsuki asked. He had the most reliable weird-sense of all of them by far. 

He made a low sort of half-hum, half-grunt. “Not right now.”

“I don’t like it, you guys.” Tatsuki held her scarf to her mouth with a hand, narrowing her eyes at the building. Like if she just stared at it long enough, the answers would come to her. The shingles would open up and talk to them or something. But the architecture remained wilfully silent, and she was forced to yield the match for now. 

Weird Shit: A Million

Tatsuki and Friends: 0

Orihime, probably noticing her expression, dropped her hands and tilted her head. “We’ll figure it out eventually, Tatsuki.”

That was an optimistic thought even for her.

Tatsuki shook her head. “Even if the buildings aren’t anything, how do you explain what happened to me and Sado that day? And everyone…” She only vaguely remembered anything about it. Most of her memory was fuzzy or completely blank. Just… feeling weaker than she ever had in her life, and falling, and then Sado being there, and something happening to his arm, and everyone else in the beginner’s class she taught—

Dying. Dead. 

She couldn’t accept that it was just some kind of gas weapon, like the police had concluded. Couldn’t accept that the explanation was so… ordinary. She’d _felt_ something back then. Seen… she didn’t know what. Silhouettes, half-there images of what looked like people but strange. Dressed all in white. And then real, solid people. A big man leaning over her, muttering something she couldn’t hear that sounded like comfort. A woman, flashing past her vision just once. For several long minutes, she tried again to make sense of the memories, to fill in the gaps, but it was no easier now than it had been the first time.

Tatsuki knew that Sado had seen more. Or at least sensed more. Experienced more. But she couldn’t get him to open up about it. And she didn’t want to push it. Not yet. Instead, she accepted Orihime’s hand when she offered it, turning to him. “Wanna come over for dinner?”

He considered this for a moment, then nodded. “Okay.”

“There’s a new episode of _Ghost Bust_ on tonight,” Orihime said, a bright smile crossing her face. That was her—able to smile even at a time like this, when so much was uncertain. Able to look for the silver lining, find all the reasons for hope that Tatsuki had missed. 

If Tatsuki could ease her loneliness in return, well… she wouldn’t hesitate for a second.

And just now, laughing at Don Kanonji and trying to eat whatever Orihime came up with for food sounded just about perfect.


	5. Hurricane in a Glass Jar

Hiyori’s lip was starting to bruise under the pressure her teeth were applying to it. 

Hachigen could see this, and he knew what it meant. The signs of anxiety, of containment, of tigers rattling the bars of their cages—they were present in the others as well. It was harder now than it used to be, maintaining serenity. For any of them. Like the pieces of them that were Hollows brought restlessness and relentless hunger along with, and only the most disciplined of personalities could tamp down on that feeling. Lid it. Keep it all from escaping. 

Hiyori had never been the most disciplined of personalities. 

Quite the opposite: she was reckless, and brash, and passionate and volatile and so many other words that could be used for people and some that could be used just as well for explosions or natural disasters. Words like that didn’t apply as easily or as often to Love or Lisa, reclined next to each other reading manga. Not even when Love spoiled something Lisa hadn’t gotten to yet with all the dramatics of a ham actor and Lisa glared venom at him for it. But Hachigen didn’t miss it. The tension in their shoulders. The way they kept just a little attention on the door, where eventually Shinji would appear and give them all the latest update. Whether the fight that raged miles away outside was the thing that would lift the shroud over their existence to the Gotei 13. 

The first step in their return, to some. Merely a new phase of evolving danger, to others. The Visored were many things: family, comrades, friends. But what they were not was unified in any real sense. 

Rose was tranquil. Kensei was pretending to it, sweeping the practice grounds in an exercise in futility. It wasn’t meant to actually clean anything, anyway, just give him a distraction. He’d been doing a great deal more of the group’s domestic chores lately for just that reason. Mashiro chirped and flitted and hovered with all the anxious energy of a hummingbird or a late-season cricket.

Hachigen merely waited, arms folded together over his chest, and tried not to let the restlessness overtake him. Instead, he studied the reiatsu signatures he could feel faintly through their protective barrier. Somewhere in Karakura Town, the Gotei 13, along with his former Chief and Yoruichi-san, battled some number of Sōsuke Aizen’s Arrancar. It didn’t seem to be going particularly well, as far as Hachigen could tell. 

He shifted where he sat, quelling the urge to stand. There was a real chance they could die. Perhaps he wasn’t supposed to care about that anymore. Few enough would have cared were the situations reversed. 

But… 

“Ugh, let’s just _go_ already!” Hiyori slammed both fists down where she sat, cracking the ground in front of her. 

There wasn’t any particular strategic advantage in acting now. It would bring them no closer to Aizen. But Hiyori wanted to fight. 

Hachigen did, too. Even if the reasons were a little different. 

None of the others responded. 

Kensei muttered something under his breath and swept with too much force, kicking up a small cloud of dust. 

Lisa flipped a page in her manga for the first time in minutes, raising her free hand to adjust her glasses. 

Hachigen thought he heard Rose sigh through his nose. 

Love pursed his lips.

Mashiro hovered. 

The door at the top of the stairs opened, and Shinji stepped through, his hat dangling from one finger. He spun it around by the brim; once, twice, three times. There was no need to do anything in particular to draw their attention. He had it from the moment his reiatsu appeared, and he knew it. 

“Well… what are we waitin’ for, then? Let’s go.”

The bars cracked.

The tigers were free.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not too much for either of these chapters, hence me publishing both at once. We move into the more vertical plot developments here pretty soon, though, so there should be bigger chapters in the future, for sure.


	6. The End of the Beginning

Though he would not speak to her for three more days, Coyote Starrk met Yuzu Kurosaki on her very first day in Hueco Mundo. 

He wouldn’t be budged on that characterization of it, either—perhaps _she_ hadn’t met _him_ until three days after, but he had met her on that day. In the throne room. While she stood before Aizen. 

To meet someone, after all, in any important sense of the word, was to get that first little piece of insight into who they were. What made them tick. And in that sense, very few things counted as a _meeting_ more than watching what someone did when Sōsuke Aizen’s attention was completely focused on them. That same low-level—almost subliminal—menace with which he always spoke and acted and _breathed_ was in clear evidence, that day, pressing down on them all like an invisible cloud of fog. Making everything heavy and sticky and uncomfortable in a way that couldn’t quite be named. 

Aizen was very good at that. 

Each of the Espada had been subject to the same thing, at least once. When they were Hollows or incomplete Arrancar or whatever they’d been before. Before this all began. Before their servitude, before the Hōgyoku, before the half-mad plot to seize control of Soul Society that would have sounded utterly absurd from any tongue, in any diction, but his. Coyote had been there to see a lot of those reactions, in the moments before each became an Arrancar—joined the ranks here, in Hueco Mundo. And so he’d met each of his comrades before he ever spoke to them.

All of them had been afraid. That was just universal. It wasn’t a matter of simple rationality, either. It was obviously rational to be afraid of Aizen. He had the power to crush every last one of them, and the apathy to do it without remorse or hesitation, should they do other than what he wished. But the fear wasn’t a rational thing, born out of that logic and knowledge. 

It was visceral. Primal, instinctive fear, just like so much else about them all was still primal and instinctive, whatever control their ascent had granted them over their impulses. The oldest emotion of all. A survival mechanism, held over from long before humanity or anyone else had ever known happiness or despair or love. Or loneliness. 

He didn’t count the tiny tremors in the captive’s body against her. He’d trembled, too, back then. Everyone had. 

Beyond that, everyone had been different. Baraggan had almost been too foolish to recognize his fear. He’d certainly been arrogant enough to attempt defiance anyway, and he’d paid for it, in time. Aizen was now the one person he never openly asserted his authority over, and that included Coyote and the other shinigami Aizen had brought with him. 

Tier had been cautious, but her monolithic desire to protect her comrades had opened her to the possibilities, consequences be damned. In the end, even her reluctance hadn’t survived the promise of an Arrancar’s strength. In a way, Coyote figured that made her the perfect subordinate. Ambitious enough to want what was offered, but not enough to ever seek more. Her freedom for strength: a sacrifice she was willing to make.

Ulquiorra was harder to read. But Coyote thought that perhaps his acceptance was a fatalistic acknowledgement that there was no upending the position of primacy Aizen held over them all. With seemingly little by way of preference for how he spent his time, he likely acquiesced from that alone. 

Nnoitra had lusted after the strength on offer in the same way he lusted after more of it now. Everything about him displayed it, sometimes more or less subtly. He was just greedy, unhappy unless he was lording himself over someone. Constantly experiencing sensation, and tasting power as often as circumstances would allow. He tended to avoid the company of people who reminded him he wasn’t able to do that with everyone he met. The gleam in his eyes when he reached for the Hōgyoku was nothing but avaricious. 

Grimmjow had been among the first of the Números; fortunately he made himself the object of Aizen’s direct attention often enough that it was not an opportunity missed, in terms of information.

And so it had gone. Szayelaporro had been afraid and intrigued by the possibilities, Zommari afraid and somehow still languid. Aaroniero had met the opportunity like a dog afraid of its master, but still hoping for the gift of food from the master’s hand. 

In a way, Coyote had met himself, too, on the day Aizen had come to him. He didn’t like to think about that, especially. 

But here was this girl. This captive. Yuzu Kurosaki, she was called. She was offered no power. Only the ability to keep her life. It should have muted any reaction but the fear. 

Yet… 

She spoke softly, clearly. Some of the things she said sounded almost like admonishments. 

_I suspect you will call me whatever you please, Sōsuke Aizen-san._

_One might. But I think that would be an overstatement._

The slight edge to her voice was something few of them would have dared. Coyote could not believe that she failed to comprehend the situation she was in: it was obvious enough for anyone to understand. That meant she was choosing this. To lace her statements and her tone with a tiny, whisper-thin thread of defiance. That, he had never seen. Certainly not in himself. Not in any of the others, either. They might howl and shout on occasion, but the moment they crossed the line to open defiance, Aizen brought them to heel, and they went.

The day Coyote met Yuzu Kurosaki was the same day he found something new in himself. 

It wasn’t his own defiance. That would take much longer. But it was the first taste he could ever remember of the thing that would lead him down that path. 

_Curiosity._

He did not understand this shinigami. This little woman, barely from the look of her even an adult. This person who could tremble before Aizen as they all did and still find in herself not resignation or greed or intrigue or any of that, but something else instead. Something he might call courage. 

Were all shinigami like that? Was this the difference between one of her kind and one of his? Or was it a feature unique to a few? Unique to her? He wondered, and he wondered enough that he wanted to know. To find out.

Without awareness, she’d planted a seed that day, in the fallow soil of his will. 

And like so much else did under her care, it would blossom.


	7. A River in Egypt

He’d been in surgery, the first time he felt the disturbance of one of those Arrancar entering Karakura Town. 

But dealing with the constant distractions provided by his proverbial sixth sense was nothing new to Ryūken, and not once did his hands waver in their steadiness. Not once did they slip or falter or tremble. Instead, he proceeded with the work necessary to implant a new kidney in place of a failing one, shutting out everything else until he was done, stepping back with bloodied gloves to allow the nurses to do their part with clamps and stitches. His was finished, for the moment. 

He scrubbed down in silence; it wasn’t unexpected of him. The team who worked with him on those few surgeries he personally conducted understood that Ryūken was not a loquacious man. He did not say unnecessary things or cloud the air with meaningless chatter. A side effect of this was that when he did think to speak, people listened. 

And since that was all exactly the way he wanted it, he’d never seen a reason to change his habits. 

This was a fact he’d only regretted in one case. 

The Arrancar had returned, this time in greater force, and the shinigami that had moved into the area recently were once again fighting them. Predictably, it was not going well. It occurred to him—not for the first time—that his assistance would be of use. 

But the thought was quelled as swiftly as it appeared, with the merciless instinct of a falcon diving for a rabbit. With a slight application of the vise of his intellect, all life was squeezed from it, and it ceased to breathe. 

He returned to his office, settled himself at his desk, and methodically began the write-up of the surgery he’d just completed. Not ten minutes later, Kanoka-san called up from the nurses’ station to inform him that the patient was stable and resting. It would take some time and medicine to ensure that the new organ was not rejected, but the operation part of the procedure was a clear success. 

That had been a rush, once. To know that a life had been in his hands, and he’d successfully preserved it. 

Once, he’d also entertained the half-guilty pleased thought that he’d kept one more soul from a shinigami’s grip just a little longer. 

Both the thought and the rush were long gone.

Ryūken moved swiftly through the documentation, narrating the sequence of events while it was still freshest in his mind, and then going back to fill in the more mundane pieces of the forms. The rhythmic clacking of the keys under his fingers and the mind-numbing formalism of the task were almost meditative, in a certain way. 

But as it always did, the photograph on his desk remained just within his peripheral vision. A gently-smiling woman and a dark-haired child who’d taken after her coloration and soft heart and after him in every other way. Too many ways, or not enough of them. He could never decide. 

The steady clacking paused. Ryūken pursed his lips. 

_I doubt he’d be happy I told you so, but yes. He’s with me. I can look after him for a while, if you like?_

He almost wished he could say he had not anticipated the consequences of his decision to allow Uryū to reside with Urahara-san. But some part of him had known it would come to something—if not something like this, then something close enough. 

He almost wished he could say he’d _allowed_ anything at all. But ridiculous as he found the notion, so much of this had fate written all over it. And perhaps some small part of him still believed in that kind of nonsense. 

A thought that would not die, no matter how hard the talons squeezed it. 

_He’s going to need you again, someday. Call it a guess. But I think you’ll know when._

Ryūken’s teeth clenched. Reaching across his desk, he pushed the button to call down to his receptionist. 

“Yes, sir?” Shigeta-san’s voice was crisp and professional, as always. 

“Clear my appointments for the first two weeks of next month. I’ll be taking a vacation.”

There was a short pause. In all his years as head of the hospital, he’d almost never done such a thing, and never on notice this short. Perhaps her surprise was understandable. 

“Of course, Director Ishida.”

First things were first: he needed to see Shihōin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I still live, I promise. Going is slow for all kinds of boring reasons, but here's some Ryūken to tide you over. A few people have been asking for a bit of him. There'll be more later, when he's actually around Uryū again.
> 
> Thanks for reading. Y'all are awesome.


	8. Ruin Impending

“I’m sorry to call on you so suddenly, but I have something I’d like to show you.”

She looked up at him with wide amber eyes, almost guileless in aspect. He could read the caution there, the apprehension and the fear, but as before she was clearly disinclined to allow it to rule her. For as long as his menace seemed to her subtle rather than overt, she would probably be capable of it. Sōsuke could recognize strength of character when he saw it, even if it would be meaningless in the grand scheme of things. 

_His_ grand scheme, as it turned out.

He touched the slender pillar at his side, and her eyes averted to it at once as the layers peeled back, exposing his Hōgyoku to her discovery. Sōsuke watched the girl study it, watched her reach her first tentative conjectures about what it was, what made it up and what it had to do with her purpose here. She was intelligent—that was good. It would be easier to bring her to the understanding he needed her to have. 

A sharp intake of breath from her was enough. She’d formed her hypotheses, and so he would test them a little. 

“You feel it too, don’t you?” He pitched his voice soft, mellow; it was a cadence he’d grown quite accustomed to using, over the long years of deception. Ever since he’d reached the only logical conclusion about the way things would have to be. He wondered just how far down this path her thoughts would be able to follow. It would be interesting to see, he thought. 

“Yes, it’s… it’s made of reiryoku, isn’t it? Just—concentrated. Compressed.” If he spoke like an instructor, she responded like a student. Something about that amused him; not such a poor form for this assessment to take.

“It is called the Hōgyoku.” He lifted it from its place, fingers closing around the transparent casing that kept it from direct contact with anything. Yet, anyway. He felt the soul-fragments within respond, but they were slow, almost resistant to any change. Inert, unless driven to awakening. And his initial attempts had been less than elegant, he would have to admit. Even now, he could feel the damage he’d done, in using it to create his Arrancar. “Hundreds—no, thousands—of fragments of reiryoku, all combined in one object. A piece of god, wouldn’t you say?”

It was a sentiment more literal than she could possibly understand, but he knew she felt some bit of it. The heaviness, perhaps, the stubborn resistance to alteration. It had a thick, cloying feel on the air, like time around it was slowing, almost stilling entirely. That property in particular was of great interest to him, but the full range of its application was yet untested. 

“It seems you understand.” Not everything, but enough. If she could come to grips with the nature of the object, then she would be able to repair it as he desired. And she was smart enough to be persuadable. To understand the position she was really in. “Due to repeated momentary awakenings, it has deteriorated slightly, but it is definitely moving towards a complete awakening, don’t you think?” 

It was only a matter of time. Time, and the necessity of joining it with its counterpart. Urahara’s Hōgyoku was in every way its opposite. Compressed reishi instead of reiatsu. Crackling instability, inertia-locked into activity rather than stillness. Chaos and order. White and black. Indeterminacy and full determinacy. Only when synthesized would either prove all that useful for the purpose he intended to put them to in the last.

From there, it was no difficulty at all to lead Yuzu down the well-trod path of his thoughts. Her task would be to repair the damaged Hōgyoku, and in so doing, guarantee the right balance of stability and variability in the final amalgam. It would be, in the end, plastic and malleable, retaining the changes he made to it, but not beyond the possibility of revision. A power potent in the main because of the sheer amount, but importantly also because of its flexibility. He would need it, to match what he pitted himself against. 

But then she surprised him.

“Aizen-san… why are you doing this?”

It was, in a way, a natural question. But it was not one anyone had ever actually asked him. His subordinates were either too afraid, too apathetic, or too wrapped up in what they wanted to inquire after his reasons. As long as the goals matched, there was little cause to bother. He arched an eyebrow at her, inviting elaboration of the question. 

“Not just  _this_.” Yuzu made a gesture to encapsulate the present situation and the Hōgyoku in his hand. “I mean all of it. Why go to war with Soul Society?”

He tilted his head at her, examining her anew. “Well, well… curious, aren’t you?” Her body language still suggested an abundance of reserve and caution, but perhaps not an _excess_ of either. 

“A persistent personal failing of mine.” Her tone was almost wry. 

She wasn’t wrong, in a sense. It was not the prerogative of shinigami such as herself to ask questions. Too many of them, or too sensitive, or placed to the wrong person or at the wrong time… people had disappeared for less. He’d watched it happen more than once. Raged against it more than once, back when he’d yet had the inclination to rage, hot and effulgent.

“If so, then I suspect you already know why,” Sōsuke said, replacing the Hōgyoku inside the slot. “That place… does everything it can to stifle brilliance and curiosity. To smother questions and thought. Surely you cannot tell me that you’ve never imagined a better world than that.”

He had once been curious, as well. Young, idealistic, convinced that a better world was possible. 

Perhaps the last was still true. He simply no longer believed it was possible without first destroying _this_ world.

“You would go to war for the right to ask questions?”

If he’d been the sort who laughed, he might have laughed at her then. She stood there, in front of him, in _this_ situation, _these_ circumstances, and asked _him_ if he treasured that right enough to fight for it? 

“Wouldn’t you?”

That brought her up short. He could see it, the _yes_ lurking under her hesitation. Perhaps, with a little more time, a little more exposure to the harsher aspects of the world she now occupied, she could have been like Kaname. Convinced to join him of her own volition, because she understood that the world was broken, the reins of it held in hands who did not know how to do aught but stifle. Oppress. Smother. 

But she was not yet at that point, and he knew it better than she did. 

“Not like this,” she said at last. 

It was a little bit disappointing, but no matter. 

Willing or not, she would serve her purpose. 

And he would shatter her world.

* * *

Though the conversation had long since ceased, Ulquiorra remained in the kitchen. He stood just in front of the furthest wall from her, not leaning against it or in any way allowing himself to behave as though he were inclined to linger. But he lingered all the same. 

She—Yuzu—was aware of his continued presence, but after answering his questions about her motives for resisting Nnoitra, she had taken it upon herself to remain as silent as he, and not fill the room with pointless noise. That, he found, was what allowed him to remain. She was quiet. 

Ulquiorra was accustomed to quiet. 

He could not go so far as to say he liked it. Even to use a word like that was to imply a preference, and he didn’t have those. Desires in general were not within his purview. His inner world was empty and dark as the void, with nothing so vivacious and lively as _want_ to fill it.

He was alone in this, he knew. The others wanted. The others felt. In so doing, they deceived themselves, but that was no concern of his. Wanting was not in his nature. Even the appetites he surely must once have felt or known in his earlier permutations, stages of life he could no longer remember, were gone from him now. He had no heart. In him there was only emptiness. 

She didn’t seem to think so, especially not after he’d told her of the one time he could recall the sensation of satisfaction. But no frame of concepts so elaborate as the one she used was necessary to explain that. Instinct drew like to like. Drew anyone to the familiar. His instincts were dull, too, but even he still had those. 

Green eyes, unblinking and dull, followed her as she moved about the kitchen. Perhaps she was not so quiet after all. The rustle and stir of her clothing was audible. He could hear her breathing, too, and almost feel the way she disturbed the air whenever she passed somewhere, because she moved lightly and quickly, in little bursts, fluid once in motion but reaching that state suddenly rather than gradually. 

She was very… alive. 

He’d not have thought that life was something that came in degrees. It was a simple binary: either something was living or it was dead. Animate or inanimate. But right in front of his eyes was a different truth: this girl, whatever else she was, was _more alive_ than he. 

“I come here every day at this time,” she said. It did not shatter a silence. Just overlaid the layer of life-noise that was already there. “I don’t know if that makes things easier—for you to know that, I mean.” 

Ulquiorra’s life had no rhythm, no inherent music. There was no harmony to gilt with a melody. Nothing came of his speaking except an intrusion into steadfast silence. But he found it was not quite so difficult, to blend his words with hers. “Do as you wish.”

She turned to look at him over her shoulder, a wry half-smile tugging at her lips. “That was an invitation, Ulquiorra-san. I was saying it so you would know that you were welcome to be here, too.”

His face didn’t move, but he almost felt the urge to frown. It was weak, and quickly gone. “Why?”

“Because I’d like your company.”

A preference with no instinct behind it. If like drew like, she should have been repulsed by him. And he by her, however faintly it would register. But he wasn’t, and neither was she. That he did not reply didn’t seem to bother her in the slightest. 

He wondered if perhaps she already knew he’d be accepting.


	9. Togetherness

予獨愛蓮之出淤泥而不染。

I love the lotus because, while growing from mud, it is unstained.

-Zhou Dunyi

* * *

In sleep, it was easy to see how small she really was.

She almost curled in on herself when she slept, her knees towards her chest, arms bent and left to rest beside her head. It was protective positioning, but also vulnerable, for it made clear her youth, her lack of imposing stature, and most damning of all, her trust. 

Yuzu would not have allowed herself to fall asleep unless she trusted that she would be safe here. With him. Coyote almost couldn’t fathom that, except that she had to sleep somewhere, and she _was_. Safe. With him. 

That was a surprise for a lot of reasons. He’d told her one of them—he’d killed the people who tried to keep his company before, unintentionally enforcing his own loneliness. Until Aizen found him, he’d never met someone who could physically withstand his company for longer than a few hours. Now, well… he was still kept away from most of the Números. Isolated within the confines of Las Noches’s central building, where those of low rank did not tread. He was a slow death for no one here. 

But he was a prisoner. That was the price. 

He’d pay it, for this. 

Yuzu shifted, a strand of tawny hair falling down over her eyes. He felt a momentary urge to brush it away, but he quashed it. The parameters of this arrangement were unspoken, but clear: he took what company she was willing to give, but the terms and boundaries were hers to decide. He would not physically touch her until he was certain she would permit it, and that the permission would not be born of fear.

When was the last time he’d touched another person? 

Her breath left her in a sleep-laden sigh; he felt the corner of his mouth twitch, and glanced away, out the open doorway into the hall. He could feel the others, except Ulquiorra. Presumably the Cuarta was somewhere reiatsu could not be detected. Szayelapporo had built a few chambers like that underground. Coyote did not know where Ulquiorra went when he left his charge in someone else’s care, but it didn’t matter. If he were anyone else, Coyote would have supposed he trained. Perhaps he did, though what point he saw in it would be difficult to say. Yuzu might be able to figure it out. But it was beyond him, and he didn’t really see the need to ask. 

Shifting his position, Coyote leaned back against the arm of her sofa, crossing his legs beneath him and letting his hands fall casually into his lap. No one else was around; he’d sense anyone approaching before they could appear. He _could_ sleep. 

That had been happening less often lately, though. Maybe because he wasn’t as bored as he used to be. Instead, he let his head tip back and closed his eyes, picking out the rhythm of Yuzu’s breathing and following it for a while, until he was almost sure his own had become synchronized with what he heard. It was shallow, soft, even. Anchored steadily, unerring and rooted to some strong foundation he could not see. 

_Sometimes our spirits don’t seem to be very much like us, do they?_

She’d asked him that, clearly expecting that this was a trait they shared—being not at all like their zanpakutō. Coyote didn’t know about himself, really, but he disagreed that she wasn’t. He couldn’t recall ever having _seen_ a lotus flower, but someone that he’d once been must have known something about them, because several bits of information came easily to his mind.

And she was just like one. 

Rooted and strong, though on the surface of things she might appear to be just the opposite. Able to persevere in the troubling conditions of her captivity with an extraordinary resilience that had to come from someplace in her soul he had never found in himself. A lotus flower could regulate its own internal temperature, leaving it less beholden to changes in its environment. And so, too, could it hold itself above the surface of the water beneath it. 

He didn’t think that was unlike her at all, really.

“Starrk-san?” It seemed Yuzu was stirring awake. 

Coyote cracked his eyes open and turned his head. “How was it?” He watched her smile at the question, knowing full well he was asking her to give her nap a number between zero and ten. 

“Seven, I think.” She pushed herself up into a sitting position, smiling slightly at him. “I’d ask how you slept, but I don’t think you did.”

“Not this time,” he conceded with a slight nod of his head. “Wasn’t all that tired.”

Yuzu accepted this information in the same easy way she accepted most things. “Well, would you like to take a walk, then?” There wasn’t a great deal else for her to do, but in a sense, following her around enabled him to move into sections of Las Noches that he wouldn’t usually enter. 

All things considered, it sounded like an excellent idea.

* * *

“Hey.” Grimmjow narrowed his eyes at the girl, waiting for her to acknowledge him. She never ignored him, but her pace was too slow and easy, like she knew everything would come in its own time and not a damn second before. He almost couldn’t get a grip on what that kind of thinking must be like, when everything in him demanded that he _hurry_. Even when there was nowhere to rush to, nothing in particular to do. 

Yuzu was dusting some kind of white powder over the food she was making. She’d made these once before and told him the name. Daifuku, or something. They had strawberries in them. Grimmjow knew this because he’d eaten almost all of them himself, something which she didn’t seem to mind. When she turned to face him, she tossed one across the kitchen. 

He caught it unthinkingly with his left arm. The one she’d fixed. Or made; he didn’t know what the word was. He bit it in half, speaking around the chewy texture. “Hurry up and finish. We’re going somewhere.”

Her eyebrows went up—obviously she wasn’t sure what to make of that statement. Whatever, she’d get it eventually. Ulquiorra, that fucking little shit, was somewhere else, and Starrk was sleeping, so that meant it was Grimmjow’s turn to hang around her. Not like they’d ever decided that, but that was how it went. He was fine with it anyway. Wasn’t like he had much to do anymore, and that fact drove him a little less crazy when she was around. Drove him a little less crazy in general, since she’d told him about that _Jinzen_ thing.

By the time Yuzu had gathered up the daifuku and tied off the bundle so she could carry it in one hand, he’d inhaled the one she’d given him and was quite literally _itching_ to move. Grimmjow resisted the urge to claw at his own skin mostly from practice, and the fact that they were going now. He didn’t bother to tell her where—she was smart enough to figure it out as they went and he didn’t have the patience to stand still a moment more anyhow. But the itching faded as he walked, because he was going somewhere and doing something with intention, and that…

_Satisfied_ was the wrong word. Nothing satisfied him. He was always hungry, not just in the food-sense of the word but in the doing-sense, the feeling-sense, _becoming_ -sense. He always needed more of all of it. But actually taking steps to get where and what he wanted smoothed the hackles and stilled the restless roiling of his inner self, the entirety of his inner world. 

So when they’d made it to the roof, he didn’t find it impossible to sit himself down, pulling his legs up underneath him and grasping his ankles in his grip. And he didn’t find it annoying when she sat down next to him and bit into one of the buns, leaving a smear of powder next to the corner of her mouth. Like where his mask fragment was. _That_ still itched, but it _never_ stopped.

“What’s it like?” he asked abruptly, turning his head to stare hard at her profile. “Soul Society.”

They’d taught her _Jinzen_ , and she’d taught him, and it was almost satisfying. Just for a little while at a time, but still.

Yuzu paused in the middle of chewing, the motion resuming only after a few seconds had passed. Her eyebrows scrunched, putting a little line in her skin between them. It wasn’t an angry expression, though—Grimmjow was familiar with anger in all its forms, and this was not it. More like… _agitation_. It faded quickly into a more normal face for her. Thoughtfulness, or something like that. He wasn’t quite as familiar, obviously. 

She swallowed, lifting her thumb to brush the powder from her cheek. “I don’t know if I can describe it in any small amount of words.”

“Try.”

The obstinate command made her roll her eyes, but then she sighed. Surrender. 

“It’s… well, there are a lot of ways in which it’s similar to this, sort of. Everyone’s gathered closer together than in the living world—the Rukongai, where most people live, is enormous. It would probably take weeks to travel out to the edge of it without _shunpō_. Maybe more.” She bit off another chunk of her dessert.

Grimmjow picked another one up too, tearing it in half with his teeth and letting the hand holding the remains rest knuckles-down on his knee. “What about the shinigami?” he asked around his mouthful, unconcerned that the dusting on the daifuku puffed out into the air with his breath.

Yuzu made a face, probably because his manners were shit. Still, this was better than he did for most people; she should be grateful. Apparently she didn’t think so. Whatever.

“The barracks are in the Seireitei, which is at the center of Soul Society. It would be like… if this big dome… city thing you have here were Soul Society, the part that’s actually the castle would be the Seireitei. It’s protected by walls, and a barrier that sits over the top.”

“What do they teach you, when you join?” Apparently _Jinzen_ was included, but that couldn’t be all of it. Grimmjow found that he really wanted to know, with a vehemence that surprised him. It shouldn’t. He didn’t do anything halfway, even the things he just stumbled into. 

That was most things. 

“Mm… shinigami arts are divided, traditionally into four branches.” Yuzu set her snack back down for a moment and ticked them off on her fingers as she spoke. “There’s zanjutsu, of course, which is how to use a zanpakutō and fight with weapons. That includes _Jinzen_. There’s hakuda, which is fighting with bare hands and your body. Hohō is movement techniques like _shunpō_. And then there’s kidō, which is… spells, I guess you’d say. Using reiryoku for a bunch of different effects, either destructive or strategic.”

Grimmjow blinked. “And they just… give away all that information for free?” No one had ever taught him anything. All he learned, about fighting and about his power, he’d learned by himself, because if he didn’t learn it he’d die. He still probably didn’t know half the things she did—this kidō stuff was as weird to him as _Jinzen_ had been. It had to be what she’d done to give him back his arm. The thought prompted him to glance down at it, flexing his empty hand and shoving the rest of his daifuku in his face with the other. 

Yuzu looked a little troubled at his words. “I wouldn’t say it’s free,” she said at last. “Shinigami are expected to serve the Gotei 13 in exchange. Few retire, unless they happen to make it to extremely advanced age. And their lives in the Seireitei are not often their own to direct. There’s a lot we aren’t free to do.”

Grimmjow snorted. “So just get strong enough that no one can tell you what to do,” he said, the thought completely obvious to him. 

She frowned slightly, but didn’t indicate why. 

He didn’t ask.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the wait; I'm a bit overwhelmed with things to do. I've been squeezing in tidbits of Refraction in between my dissertation proposal, my novel project (new and in need of so much TLC), my interactive fiction project, teaching, and any semblance of a social life I want to have. It's... a substantial amount of stuff. But slow as I may be, I don't leave things unfinished, so there's that. For those of you still with me, thanks a million.


	10. Death and the Damned

The visitors’ chairs in the rooms at Karakura hospital were hardly the most comfortable places to sit. Ryūken had never given this much consideration before, as he had never been a visitor to anyone here. Often he entered these rooms as a surgeon, sometimes he did so as hospital director. But his role had always been to stand in these places, and tell things to people that they usually didn’t know. 

He’d never been one of the people who sat, uncertain exactly what they should make of the situation before them, uncomfortable in one of these chairs and also in ways he was less apt to name, ways sourced from emotions and connections he tried very hard to suppress. 

As a surgeon or a hospital director, that suppression was absolute necessity. To become emotionally entangled in the life of a patient was to be halfway to failing them as a physician. 

It was hard to decide, then, what to say about a situation where the emotional entanglement, messy and snag-riddled as it was, already existed. 

Ryūken allowed himself the indulgence of a heavy sigh, now that there was no one around to hear. He’d come to the conclusion that he would not be able to clamp the iron talons of his logic down on everything else this time. It wasn’t a recent revelation, exactly, but it had been made especially sharp to him in the moment before he released his arrow. The one he knew would hit. For a moment, he’d felt a paralyzing doubt—however perfect he knew his aim to be, intellectually, however confident he was in his abilities, there was always a possibility of error. 

And _error_ would kill his son. 

Fortunately, Uryū’s own surprise when his gritz had been broken kept him rather still, and Ryūken’s hands were steady when he fired. Steady like they were when he made his incisions. 

They weren’t steady now. 

He laced his fingers together under his chin, shifting slightly on the thinly-padded chair. It creaked softly underneath him. The sound wasn’t near enough to wake Uryū, still unconscious in the bed, raised to Fowler’s position. The monitors were steady; Ryūken processed the auditory information automatically, refusing to stand and check them visually yet again. There was no need. Save the new zeichen etched into the skin at the very center of his chest, Uryū was physically fine. All he suffered from now was exhaustion, along all dimensions: physical, mental, spiritual. The IV in his arm would be more help for that than any amount of useless hovering on Ryūken’s part. 

Damn his fingers and their trembling. 

“Have I done the right thing?” He hated the sound of his own doubt, the way his voice bled where it cracked. He hated that he still spoke to someone dead, someone who wouldn’t know the sight of him from Adam if ever they did meet again. But most of all, he hated that he didn’t know the answer to his own question. 

How many critical decisions about his son’s future had been in his hands over the years? What were the odds that he’d done right, even overall? The rift between them was vast. He’d put it there trying to discourage Uryū from walking the path he now seemed determined to tread. Was his reversal now—his attempt to arm his only child with all he could give—the right one? Even if it were, had it come too late? There were so many things Uryū had never learned about being Quincy. Things Ryūken had thrown away, discarded to the greatest extent he could. But now that would make him a less effective teacher. He almost regretted turning from that life, for the difficulties it was presenting him now. 

And the future—

He didn’t want to think about the future. The present was problem enough. He’d probably have a matter of weeks or less to teach Uryū what would have taken most years to learn. There was much ground to make up. 

Ryūken supposed he had to hope that the boy’s stubbornness would finally have an outcome he wanted it to.

* * *

When Uryū came to, it was on the dark side of his divided world.

He blinked several times, letting his eyes adjust to the deep grey that surrounded him. It wasn’t difficult to locate the only brightly-colored things in the space: Yorugen’s robin’s-egg eyes. 

The spirit was almost Uryū’s exact dimensions today, bent over him at the waist, head tilted. “You’re different,” he said, voice very small. 

Grunting softly, Uryū pushed off the ground until he was sitting upright. Something in his chest twinged; he placed his fingers over the spot and prodded it. His mouth formed into a grimace. He remembered pain there, white-hot and searing like he was just about to be vaporized. He wondered if that was what it felt like to be shot in the _saketsu_ or _hakusui_. Something he’d learned about a long time ago. 

Back when he’d had Quincy powers.

“Different how?” he asked the shadow, hissing as he clambered to his feet. His legs were too weak underneath him; he almost stumbled, at least until Yorugen caught him with a hand to his shoulder, pushing carefully until he was upright again. 

Wait, that wasn’t right. Yorugen was a shadow. He couldn’t physically touch people.

“I’m different, too,” he whispered. Luminous eyes darted to the left. “It’s because she’s awake now.”

“She’s—” Uryū didn’t feel the need to finish his own question, taking off for the dividing line of the world, weakness be damned. 

_Lucia_.

He must have tripped a half-dozen times on his way, but it wasn’t enough to send him to the ground, and that was all he bothered to concern himself with. Sure enough, as he drew closer to where the deep grey-black of Yorugen’s domain sharply transitioned into the flat, featureless white of Lucia’s, he could see her.

She was standing, facing his direction. 

All at once, he was right in front of her, as though the intervening distance had simply ceased to exist. It was, quite naturally, only then that Uryū realized he had no idea what to say. 

Lucia, however, didn’t seem to need him to say anything at all. Her expression, stern and smooth by default, formed into a tiny smile, just a subtle curve to one side of her mouth and a softening of her silvery eyes.

“It’s been a while, Uryū Ishida. I see you’ve met my brother.”

* * *

“Well, I think that does it.” Kisuke rolled his shoulders, flexing his right hand. That kidō stung his fingers. A small price to pay, for what it was going to do now that he’d figured out exactly how to use it most effectively. 

The woman across from him blinked. “You think it will suffice? This Aizen has much greater reiatsu than Shūren did.” Amari regarded him from one nearly-luminous blue eye. 

“If you’re really that worried, you could always help, you know.”

Her zukin distorted; he could tell she was scowling beneath it. He tended to cause that reaction in people. He really should be more careful, particularly with her. 

“You know it isn’t that simple. I’ve given you what I can. You’re supposed to be a genius—figure the rest out yourself.” 

Kisuke nearly laughed at the haughty sniff that seemed to underlie the words, but even he had some sense of self-preservation. The easiest way out of Hell was one he could only take if she willed it. And he could afford no delays. Already, he wondered if he might not be too late. He hadn’t liked what he saw Yuzu Kurosaki do, those months ago. He knew Aizen would find out. Knew he’d seek to accelerate the fusion of the two hōgyoku with the young shinigami’s power. 

He also had an inkling that the attempt wouldn’t go half as well as Aizen hoped, but Kisuke couldn’t afford to bet on it. Better to proceed as planned, and let serendipity surprise him, if she dared. 

“I take it that I don’t need to remind you of our terms.” Amari’s eye narrowed; while hardly humorous at the best of times, he recognized her as especially serious now. 

Lifting a hand, he waved it dismissively. “I won’t forget. When the time comes, I’ll do the guiding, but the rest will be up to you and them.”

She nodded. “That’s acceptable. Now go—I’ll open the gate.” A pause, and then: “Do not fail, Kisuke Urahara. Too much depends on this.”

He grinned and gave her a jaunty salute. Really. Some people just couldn’t lighten up.

Some days, Kisuke even felt like one of them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, uh… hi. I’m alive. Have a chapter.
> 
> (Also, the last parts of Refraction will probably be compressed. There are a lot of fight scenes and stuff in the latter part of _Catastrophe_ , and not as many extras I want to include, so there might not be something for every corresponding chapter. On the plus side, that means forward plot motion sooner, so there’s that.)


	11. Eyes Wide Open

_Faster. Don’t tell me you’ve already forgotten what it feels like to travel the paths._

Lucia had not been miraculously gentled by her time asleep—but Uryū found he didn’t mind that so much. Between her instruction and Ryūken’s, he couldn’t help but feel that he was close to something important. 

He grimaced, resisting the instinct to step into _shunpō_ and gathering reishi beneath his feet instead, leaping from the instance of _hirenkyaku_ and flying across the room towards Ryūken. 

_More. You must not fear this power._

Grimacing, he pushed more reishi into the Schneider in his left hand, bringing it around and down to clash against his father’s bow. With a surge in his own power, Ryūken reversed Uryū’s momentum and shoved him back, the uneven distribution of force rotating him end-over-end until he stopped himself again with another instance. 

She was right, in a sense. Though it had not yet been even a full half-decade since he’d lost the ability to manipulate reishi, something about it still felt unnatural to him now. Unfamiliar. He kept reaching for his reiryoku instead, and Lucia scolded him each time, trying to guide him back to the powers that had once been almost as natural as drawing breath. 

It was working, at least to an extent. But maybe she was right to describe what impeded him now as a type of fear. The lesson of the sanrei glove had been that exerting himself to excess could well trap an important part of himself beyond his own reach. He wished he could say that he understood exactly what about the glove had done it. Whether it was something that he might accidentally replicate on his own. 

_And what? You think I would let you fall with no warning?_

Forming his bow, Uryū fitted the Schneider to the string, drawing back until he felt the slight sting of live reishi against his skin. His constructions weren’t completely stable yet, and the bow disintegrated as soon as he’d released the arrow. He clicked his tongue against his teeth and flashed away from the retaliatory volley. 

_That was shunpō._

Yorugen was not particularly helpful at this juncture either. He almost seemed to be deriving some amusement from Lucia’s instruction methods, but he also came across as quite… careful, in their interactions. He’d never been especially talkative, but he was downright quiet for the moment. Perhaps just a function of the lesson. 

Uryū felt Lucia sigh.

_Again. Stabilize it this time. No more swordplay until your bow keeps its shape. And then we’re going to talk about your blood._

“Were you planning to start fighting me at some point, or should I set up a straw target and go do something useful with my time?”

It was Uryū’s turn to sigh. Two equally exacting teachers was enough for now. He almost missed getting pummeled by a smiling Kyōraku-taichō at this point. But he knew what they were trying to do, and the least he could do in return was put his back into it and give it everything he had. 

Yuzu was waiting.

* * *

“Ulquiorra.”

Coyote slid his hands into his pockets. The other Espada moved around him as they exited the meeting chamber. Aizen had told them to stay put in the central building—but he’d have to know that the chance of most of them doing that was nil. Already he could feel Nnoitra going… somewhere. Szayelaporro’s reiatsu had disappeared, which was a sure sign he’d gone to his labs or whatever they were. Harribel would do what Aizen had said. 

She might be the only one.

That was probably more or less exactly what he intended anyway. 

Ulquiorra paused, turning back over his shoulder to fix Coyote with one deep green eye. There wasn’t much to go by on his face, but the fact that he’d stopped at all was telling enough, and the Primera knew there was no way he’d missed the obvious hint earlier. Aizen was onto them. And there was no way they got what they were after here if they both tried to do it alone. 

Maybe there was no way they got it anyway, but Coyote had decided it was worth a try. 

“We need to talk.”

The muscles around Ulquiorra’s mouth tightened just fractionally, a frown pulling at him but never quite manifesting. There was no point in trying to leave everything unsaid anymore. Aizen knew. They couldn’t un-convince him of the truth by acting indifferent now. The Cuarta had to know that as well as he did, which was probably why he inclined his head, just fractionally, and resumed his walk by turning down a side passageway Coyote had never explored before. 

The smell of lotus tea faded as he followed the other Espada through one gleaming, bone-white corridor after another. If he hadn’t spent his entire life before on gleaming, bone-white sand, he wasn’t sure he could have stood the eyestrain. He wondered how Yuzu dealt with it, sometimes. Then again, it was the least of her problems.

A staircase took them down a level, into a large, empty chamber of some kind. Oddly, it was only dimly lit. More startling was that he lost the sense of reiatsu around him, except Ulquiorra’s, like that perceptual ability had suddenly been confined to this room. He remembered an earlier suspicion that the Cuarta might train somewhere—this must be that place. 

Quite abruptly, Ulquiorra stopped and about-faced, hands in his pockets in a mirror of Coyote’s posture. 

“Speak, then.”

Coyote blinked slowly. “I think he’s made all of us. And he’s not gonna let her live much longer, with the intruders on the way. He’s not the type to leave a loose end untied. We have to decide what we’re going to do.”

“What is there to be done?” Ulquiorra replied tonelessly. “None among us is capable of protecting her from him.”

Coyote felt his jaw tighten, then suppressed the reaction. This was Ulquiorra being… well, the way he’d always been. But not the way he’d been in the last month or so. He tried to remind himself that things he’d seen with his own eyes as recently as yesterday gave the lie to this line of thinking. He didn’t know why the Cuarta clung so tightly to this notion that everything they did or could do was meaningless, but Coyote figured that it was probably the same reason he’d used to cling to his loneliness, used to simply accept that it was the way things had to be. 

Because the alternative was difficult in every sense. And risky in every sense. And they were creatures of habit and instinct, deep down. Changing was not a simple matter. 

_Too late to regret it, though._

Lilynette was right. 

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But I’m not going to do nothing. Are you?” When there was no response, he sighed heavily. “Even if you’re right; even if the result is the same no matter what, do you really want her to know you gave up on her without trying? Could you stand to hurt her like that?”

He knew he couldn’t. 

“Aizen has shared nothing relevant of his strategy with us. We should not plan without knowing what he will do.” 

Coyote let out a small breath, almost relieved. There was something… heartening about knowing he wasn’t in this alone. “Right. We’re going to have to be prepared to adapt as the situation changes. Or, well… you and I will, anyway. Grimmjow’s just gonna do whatever he wants, regardless.”

Ulquiorra’s eyes narrowed slightly. “While Aizen finds none of us remotely threatening, he finds Grimmjow least so.”

There might be something of use in that, Coyote supposed. “At least he’s not that hard to predict. He’s going to go after that Kenpachi guy first chance he sees. If he’s still alive after that, Aizen probably won’t bother to track him too closely.” Which meant his next immediate priority would probably be Yuzu. A lot of hypotheticals in that, though. It was a start regardless.

“I still do not believe we stand a chance of success.”

“Yeah, me either. I just… don’t care, you know?” It wasn’t exactly the right way to put it, because the whole point was that he _did_ care, just not about the odds. 

There was a long silence. Coyote was about to shrug and resign himself to the disagreement when Ulquiorra nodded, more an uncomfortable and very slight jerk of his chin than anything.

“I will go see her now. She should know what is coming.” He started back towards the door. 

Coyote followed. “Sure. Bring her to me if Aizen tells you to go somewhere else. Nnoitra seems to be gone, but…” 

The implication was clear enough. Now more than ever, they couldn’t afford to leave Yuzu on her own. Not now, not here. 

Whether any of it would make a lick of difference remained to be seen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Christmas/Xmas/Festivus/December 25, friends. One chapter left to go in this one, I think.


	12. Around Again

The other captains filed out of the meeting hall, leaving Shunsui and Jūshirō alone with Genryūsai-sensei. This wasn’t exactly uncommon—though it had been a while since they’d held one of these meetings, the senior captains did have the benefit of a bit more of the Sōtaichō’s… not trust, exactly. Not with their defiant habits. But his confidence. 

There was something very weighty about that, and Jūshirō could not help thinking that it would press even more heavily upon him after their master had said whatever it was he intended to say to them. 

“Come closer.”

Jūshirō shot a glance at Shunsui. As usual, his best friend’s face betrayed nothing; he wore the same lazy half-smile as he always did. Shrugging his shoulders casually, Shunsui broke from his place at the end of the hall and moved to stand at a more conversational distance to Genryūsai-sensei. Jūshirō hesitated only half a second before following him, some unease he had trouble naming prickling at the surface of his skin, under his sleeves.

They both waited for sensei to speak—Shunsui was patient enough to wait for most things, and Jūshirō… well, he tried to be. He’d never developed _quite_ the same talent for picking the exact moment for everything, though. His eyes slid from his friend to his teacher, and he pressed his lips together, suppressing the tickle at the back of his throat. 

“We must discuss contingencies.” The Sōtaichō’s hands moved atop his staff, and he laid the right over the left on the bulbous knob at the top, former ridges worn smooth over thousands of years of the same behavioral tic. 

Jūshirō thought sometimes that they’d all changed the landscape, over so many tens of thousands of days treading over it. So often the same paths—had his feet packed the route from his house to the office an inch closer to sea level? Two? And what had that time worn in places that could not be seen?

Ah, so that was the unease. Foreboding. 

The fear that someone he had known so long would carve no more inches into the earth.

The fear that someone he had known for less time would never have the chance to impress even one. 

Had their inches been enough?

“Contingencies?” Shunsui echoed the word with nary a trace of foreboding to be seen or heard. He wasn’t the kind to put much stock into that sort of thing anyway. Even in the direst situations, he refused to count the unhatched chickens, refused to reach the foregone conclusions. Fate was for the workers of lesser miracles, and he laughed in its face. “Well, that sounds ominous. What contingencies did you have in mind, Yama-jii?”

Sensei sighed, heavily, more weighed down by his age in their presence than he would ever allow himself to be before the younger officers. This, Jūshirō understood, was the privilege and burden of their position as his only remaining direct students. 

“You already know what I’m talking about, Shunsui.” The Sōtaichō’s brow furrowed, deepening the lines around his eyes. “We need to designate a ground commander for the Seireitei during the conflict in false Karakura, and we must also settle the matter of succession.”

Shunsui did indeed not seem all that surprised, but Jūshirō felt a little fission run up his spine. “Succession? You’re… that concerned about what may happen?”

It made a certain amount of sense, of course. Aizen was a wildly intelligent opponent, with the power of a poorly-understood artifact in his possession. But still—it had been so long since anything _really_ threatened the Gotei 13. And to have it emerge from within… In all his years, this was not a path that Jūshirō had tread. 

Sensei nodded slightly. “Preliminary reports indicate that at least one of the Arrancar under Aizen’s command is capable of harmlessly absorbing a Hadō #99. Considering how few of our soldiers could even _cast_ something like that, we cannot afford to make assumptions about our safety. Any of us.”

Shunsui adjusted his hat, a shadow falling over his eyes. Jūshirō could almost _feel_ the way his demeanor shifted, though very little about his appearance changed at all. His only tell was his eyes, which was why he’d hidden them, no doubt. 

It was with some unease, then, that the captain of the Thirteenth prodded the discussion forward. “Perhaps… that matter first, and then the other?”

Genryūsai-sensei inclined his head, then met Jūshirō’s eyes. They held gazes for a long moment—it was difficult to suppress the instinct to look down or away. But in this moment, he and Shunsui were not merely the Sōtaichō’s subordinates. They were the people that he had long ago acknowledged might one day be his equals. In this, then, backing down was impossible. 

“In the event that I fall on the field of battle, Shunsui will be granted command of the Gotei 13.”

Jūshirō nodded. Shunsui was the obvious choice for many reasons. His own sickness was among them, but it was not remotely the greatest in the set. He had been expecting this eventually—of greater surprise was the fact that he was hearing the words so _soon_. Though perhaps he’d lost all concept of time-relative things like soon and late and so on. Perhaps this was just soon enough. 

“If that’s the case, Yama-jii,” Shunsui said, folding his arms into his sleeves, “I’d like to make a request.”

Sensei shifted his attention to the other man, and Jūshirō released a breath he had not known he was holding. 

“What is it?”

“Let me pick who commands the Gotei 13 while the rest of us are away.”

Jūshirō knew immediately where Shunsui was going with this. He could even understand the reasoning. Still… “She’s not going to be happy with you.”

His friend cut him a glance to the side, a humorless smile tilting his mouth. “Oh, I know.”

A heavy breath passed from the Sōtaichō, but he nodded nevertheless. “She is qualified. I accept your proposal. You are both dismissed.”

“Sensei—” Jūshirō bit down on the sentence before more than the first word had escaped him. It sounded faithless in his own head, like doubt had invaded one of the places it did not and could never belong. He struggled for a way to complete it that didn’t expose those implications. 

“…Thank you.” 

His teacher very clearly knew that this wasn’t what he’d set out to say, but he pretended as though it were. His lips pursed, as though he were halfway to speaking himself, but his discipline was greater than Jūshirō’s, and in the end, he merely nodded tightly.

* * *

Retsu Unohana knew that there were many types of silence. 

This one, the silence that fell over a leveled stretch of Hueco Mundo, in the span of time after Yachiru and Grimmjow’s departure but before the arrival of the Arrancar her ninth seat had banished, was a solemn one. 

The silence of the dead.

Her eyes fell to the red stain on the sand, dented in a broad, shallow pattern. The last place Kenpachi Zaraki had drawn breath. 

The place a hope of hers had gone to perish. 

In a way, she’d always known it was a futile one. Most hopes were. That was something she’d learned, as the sheer number of them she’d held had swelled with the years and then nearly tapered off altogether when the futility of them just kept reasserting itself. So many hopes, dashed. 

Here lay her hope for a defined end to all of it. The final silence.

It had always simply been a matter of waiting. For a moment when Soul Society was stretched beyond its measure, for a moment when she would be asked to finish something that she had begun a very long time ago. For him to be ready for that. But his end had been swifter to meet him, what he’d managed to become in the meantime not quite enough to protect him. In a way, that was in his own fault. His choices belonged to no one but him, after all. Had he remained with the group, it was unlikely that this particular ignominious fate would have befallen him. 

And yet… there was also a sense in which this was _her_ fault. Had she not been wandering, there and then on that day, had she not sensed and tracked him, intrigued by the feel of his reiatsu—raw and angry like a wound—he would not be here. He might have died somewhere else instead. 

Or he might have lived.

Mostly, however, the fault lay with the opponent she now waited for. While the rest of it was tangled in regret and a quiet sort of grief for the opportunity gone by, there was nothing about _this_ that she found confusing. The Arrancar that had killed Kenpachi Zaraki would die by her hand. Even if no one knew, that was not a title she would allow to be carried by anyone so unworthy of it. 

Perhaps one day she would find someone else to hand it to. But for the moment, it would be hers again. 

She hoped his next life was more peaceful than this one had been. Retsu hadn’t always understood the value of peace. Of tranquil silences. Once, in the throes of her bloodlust and the height of her violence, she’d disdained it. Thought it the telos of the weak. Only in near-death had she ever felt _alive_ to begin with. Peace was like sleep, and sleep only kept her from the enjoyment of the things she pursued. 

But over time, she’d begun to wonder. Peace continued to elude her, whatever porcelain faces she wore to the contrary. It was more difficult to obtain than any violence ever had been. 

And she’d come to covet it. 

It would suit, then, if he—done such an injustice in this life as to inherit her mantle only halfway—had in the next life the one thing that seemed so permanently beyond her grasp. Yes. That was what she wanted for him. 

As for herself—Retsu would have vengeance, and all the disquiet it entailed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's the end of this one! There wasn't really too much to be done with the last part of _Catastrophe_ , given how fight-heavy it was, I think. Plus, well, it's just going to be more helpful for me to have clearance to get going on what is currently kind of an amorphous blob of ideas for other fics that I need to beat into some semblance of an order and then write. 
> 
> The first one will focus on the start of some of the rebuilding the Gotei 13 has to do after the Winter War, specifically on what's up in the Eleventh. POV characters Yumichika and Ikkaku. So that'll happen... at some point. 
> 
> Also, because I had a couple people specifically ask me about Gin and Rangiku stuff: I haven't forgotten you! I just think I'll be able to do that whole mess more justice as part of a separate, later fic. It's on the list though; there will be a Rangiku-centric fic at some point in the sequence.
> 
> As always, your feedback is appreciated, and I do apologize for being slow as molasses uphill in winter.


End file.
